Channel Nine Afternoon News with Davina Smith
E&OE
DAVINA SMITH: Joining us live from Sydney is the Minister for Social Services Scott Morrison. Minister, thank you for your time this afternoon, start from the outside who is going to benefit from this programme?
MINISTER MORRISON: As you said people who – families who currently can’t access those mainstream services so that may be police men and women, those working in the fire service, ambulance officers, Customs officers, people working shift work, also families with children with special needs and families in many rural and regional areas where the breadth of services that we enjoy in the major metropolitan areas don’t exist. So that really is to close a gap that was identified from the Productivity Commission report where there were many families who just couldn’t get the childcare support they needed to be in a job and stay in a job.
SMITH: Early Childhood Australia today they are concerned nannies won’t need basic qualifications. Will children be safe in their care?
MINISTER MORRISON: Of course they will and I think that is a fairly alarmist point of view from the critics. What we are doing here is ensuring that nannies have the appropriate health and working with children qualifications and certainly nannies would be able to provide other services for early childhood education if that is what families want. But families should be exercising that choice in what extra they might want to pay for those services. These aren’t mainstream services, they are supplementary services, we are not running a school here we are looking after kids of shift workers.
SMITH: We have heard a lot about the pressure the federal budget is under at the moment. This programme or this trial is worth $250 million, I guess some may ask where the money is coming from?
MINISTER MORRISON: From the savings we put to last year’s budget and those savings currently unlegislated will be for the reforms we are going to put in place here. It is important when the government invests more which we will be doing. We will be investing more in childcare and early childhood education through the package that we have partly announced today and will announce all the way to the budget and to ensure that we are not hitting the taxpayer further for that. We have put forward savings in the budget last year and if they pass then we will be able to move ahead with this increased investment.
SMITH: It is getting a lot of attention today. Minister we thank you for your time this afternoon.
MINISTER MORRISON: Thank you, good to be with you.